English

OpenBot: Turning Smartphones into Robots

Robotics 2021-03-12 v2 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Machine Learning

Abstract

Current robots are either expensive or make significant compromises on sensory richness, computational power, and communication capabilities. We propose to leverage smartphones to equip robots with extensive sensor suites, powerful computational abilities, state-of-the-art communication channels, and access to a thriving software ecosystem. We design a small electric vehicle that costs $50 and serves as a robot body for standard Android smartphones. We develop a software stack that allows smartphones to use this body for mobile operation and demonstrate that the system is sufficiently powerful to support advanced robotics workloads such as person following and real-time autonomous navigation in unstructured environments. Controlled experiments demonstrate that the presented approach is robust across different smartphones and robot bodies. A video of our work is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc8hFLyWDOM

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2008.10631,
  title  = {OpenBot: Turning Smartphones into Robots},
  author = {Matthias Müller and Vladlen Koltun},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.10631},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Accepted at ICRA'21. Documentation and code are available at www.openbot.org

R2 v1 2026-06-23T18:04:23.519Z